Day 20 - Communications, Weather, Visit

-------------------- Communications --------------------

Last night I started my Sailmail session a little early, at about 11.25 PM, and managed to get a connection very quickly. I had 4 messages to go out, 2 blogs (Days 18 and 19), a position report, and a grib file request. Sailmail advised me when it was sending each message, and the transfer rate was a respectable 1200 bytes/min.

When the last message is sent Sailmail then interacts with my computer to tidy up before going on to see if I have any incoming messages. It is at this stage that the status of the messages on my machine are changed from "outbox". It was at this tidy-up stage that communications stopped. After 20 or so unsuccessful retries by Sailmail I was disconnected. Thereafter, try as I might I could not get another connection. I am fairly confident that the messages got out OK, and that the next time I connect Sailmail will inform me that the four messages have already been sent, as has happened before. I hope that the messages did get out so that readers will understand the situation.

I am not sure of what is causing these failures. Tonight I will start my Sailmail session at 11.15 PM, even though the Sailmail propagation tool tells me that this is not an optimal time. By the way, I also tried Africa last night with no success.

-------------------- The Weather --------------------

It has been a difficult 12 hours with that gale that I was expecting. I hove to at midnight. The boat and the Monitor were coping well, even though the wind was howling, the following seas were huge, and we were running at over 8 kts, sometimes registering over 9 kts. But we were on a SE track about to cross latitude 37S, the approximate latitude of TdC, and I did not want to go any farther south. Besides, twice the Monitor control lines had jumped off the drum, resulting in horrendous bangs as the mainsail gybed. I corrected this by making the lines super tight but nevertheless did not want to risk a repetition.

The boat fared fairly well for the rest of the night, under the circumstances. Knowing that there was nothing more that I could do for the boat I stripped down, dried off, put on my dry set of underpants (sweater and T-shirt were OK) and fluffy and warm track suit pants. With that I had a comfortable sleep under two dry and warm blankets.

Throughout the night we got pounded hard every few minutes by waves breaking onto the boat and sending water across the cabin top. I was up at 7.30 AM to find the boat still in rough conditions. After a cup of coffee I faced the inevitable and swapped to my damp underclothes and track suit pants, donned my wet weather gear, making sure that the sailing jacked was zipped up to my chin and the hood was over my head, and went into the cockpit for checks and adjustments. It was still wild out there and I had to be careful because one of those waves could break into the cockpit at any time - rarely, but still a possibility. I tightened the lines holding the Monitor pendulum at center, tightened the lines keeping the wheel hard to weather, and brought on the starboard running backstay so that now both backstays were giving the mast some support.

I looked up at the mainsail and saw that it had held up OK. (It is 6 years old and I worry about it blowing out.) I noted that the bow swung in an arc of 45 to 80 degrees off the wind, as the boat yawed in the rough seas. Yet we were meeting the waves at times almost head on. It was then that I got another useful insight into heaving to. I had hove to simply by hardening up the sail and pointing the boat to the NE with the wind off the port side. This was good because my drift would by biased to the north. But with the wind expected to back (ie counterclockwise) as the low south of us moved toward the east I would get the same assistance as on the last gale, with the bow pointing more directly into the oncoming waves as the wind backed. Had I hove to on the starboard tack, as the wind clocked around the boat would have clocked around with it, putting it broadside to the waves. I've got to remember to take this factor into consideration in the future.

After a look forward to see that nothing was amiss I returned to the cabin where I would stay in my wet weather gear for the rest of the day.

In the 10 hours that we had been hove to we drifted 21 miles to the ENE, and I could not have asked for a better direction. The wind was from the NW, which would give us a good point of sail, but I would wait a few hours for the wind to ease and the sea to calm down a bit.

-------------------- The Visit --------------------

When I heard the suggestion to visit Tristan da Cunha I had visions arriving on a bright and sunny day, with a moderate wind and sea, followed by calm deliberation on where to best anchor the boat.

But this is our third gale since leaving Brazil, and all three brought ferocious winds from the north, the side of the island where the TdC community lies. Here I am hove to and less than 300 miles from the island, leading me to think that they are subject to similar conditions that I've been experiencing. Because I have an aversion to land at the best of times, because it will be a strange holding ground (for the anchor), and primarily because I am sailing alone, I must set the bar very high regarding conditions that I will require for a visit. I could not enjoy any visit to the island knowing that the boat is unattended to during risky conditions. Several months ago I sent a message to TdC administration informing them of my plans an asking for advice on anchoring. It would be helpful now had they responded, but I heard nothing from them.

What this all adds up to is that I plan to sail close enough to the island to see it, will try to establish radio contact, but unless I have complete confidence that conditions are safe I will sail on. I have come too far to take unnecessary risks with this boat.

This mid Atlantic, by the way, is a real piece of work. I would not have thought that in the 30's latitudes in December I would experience these Horn-like conditions.

--------------------

At 11 AM the sun came out and at 11.30 AM I set sail. The waves were still high but the wind had calmed and I figured that we would be able to sail downwind more comfortably than hove to, and so it was. Soon we were making 5.5-6.0 kts to just slightly north of east. The blow was over and I was feeling better.

At noon our position was 36S50, 017W53, giving us a n-n distance of 102 miles in the direction 103T. We were now 267 miles from TdC. The barometer was down to 1002 hPa, a whopping 8 point drop from the day before.

After lunch (cup a soup and a slice of cheese) I switched on the Rutland wind charger and it immediately began to produce 2 and 3 amps. The sky had cleared completely and under the bright sun the solar panels were producing 7 amps. I retired to the bunk wearing my wet weather gear to read a bit from the Kindle (The Lewis and Clark Expedition) and have a short snooze.

Later in the afternoon I prepared another bean stew. Some of the carrots and potatoes had started to spoil and I recovered what I could from them. I figure that I'll be able to make at least one more stew, which I would make in 5 days' time and would support me for the following 5 days. If I can make two more stews all the better because that would support me for 15 days, getting nice and close to arrival at Cape Town. ... Not that I'm hurting for food. I haven't even touched the spaghetti, with the plenty of sauce and Parmesan cheese to go with it, and I've had only one of the tins of sardines in tomato sauce. There are cans of fish, too.

While I was waiting for the pressure cooker to do its work I had a look at my inventory of courtesy flags. I found a beautiful large flag of South Africa. However, I do not have a British Union Jack on board because my planning didn't envision possible visits to the Falklands and Tristan da Cunha. But not to worry. I've got a well used Australian flag with holes in the area of the stars. I figure that I can cut out the Union Jack part of the Aussie flag and use it for the visit to TdC, if that happens. It would not be a large courtesy flag but hey, it's not a large island either.

I had an hour of hard wet sailing on deck. The mainsail gybed for the third time and that was the last straw. The problems were that we had too much power, speed, and weather helm and the huge following seas were knocking the stern around. The Monitor just could not cope. The only way that I could think of dousing the sail was to use the engine, point the boat into the wind and waves to take the pressure off the sail, and hope that the autopilot would cope. At the mast I frantically worked to pull the sail down with one hand while sheets of water swept the foredeck. Once I had the peak of the sail lashed so that the sail wouldn't ride up the mast I tightened the halyard then put the boat downwind and rolled out the headsail. Lazy jacks or no lazy jacks, I then had to go back to the top of the cabin to put two straps around the mainsail, one because the end of a batten had missed the lazy jack cord and was lying on the cabin top chafing, the other to keep sail and sail cover off the spray dodger.

With the jib pulling along it was different sailing. I rolled out only enough headsail to make a comfortable speed of 5.5-6.0 kts instead of the 7+ kts the mainsail had been forcing us to make. I noticed that there was less gyration of the wheel by the monitor. The boat careened less and rode more comfortably. If the boat gybed the small amount of headsail out would be able to cope easily.

I have a problem with that mainsail going downwind in heavy air. I need it for heaving to but the price I pay is being overpowered on the buildup to the gale and being overpowered in the aftermath, being constantly terrified that the sail will be stressed from a gybe. The ideal strategy I suppose is to put up the mainsail at the point of heaving to, but I deem that too dangerous in wild weather, and in any event there would be issues of controlling the boat during the hoist. I'm toying with the idea of putting canvas on the side of the cockpit attached to the stainless steel frame. That might provide enough windage to bring the stern of the boat into the wind when hove to with the trysail up. I have a storm jib in the hold that was too light for this boat and I'll see about hacking it up to fit on the side of the frame. It sounds like a desperate measure but I'm at my wits end on the issue. If the prototype works OK I'll have something properly made up in Cape Town.

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